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The Greek chair dates from 1541; the Cambridge equivalent had been
established a year before (Catherine Parr was a Cambridge woman). Each
had an initial stipend of £40, and I have been told that the Cambridge
professor is still ceremonially presented with a purse of £40 a year. That is not
the only thing that the Cambridge professor gets that the Oxford one does
not. The Cambridge chair has a coat of arms (Figure 2). Prominent features
are the owl of Athena at the top, and what looks like a grasshopper, but is,
I think, a cicada at the bottom. The owl signifies wisdom; the cicada perhaps
indicates the sweet flow of words and culture inspired by the Muses. The
grasshopper, we are told, was also a heraldic emblem favoured by Napoleon.
I make no comment on that, and of course none of this rankles with
me at all.
The Oxford chair was to be linked with the newly
founded college of Christ Church, which was originally
to be called Cardinal College, as the real founder was
Cardinal Wolsey (Figure 3, also from Christ Church
Hall): Henry took it over, shall we politely say, after
Wolsey had fallen from grace and died. For all the
magnificence of the buildings, one can see that they
were never finished: the main quadrangle was to be
surrounded by a cloister, and the bases for the pillars
and the framework for the arches linking it to the
buildings are all in place (Figure 4). That was not the
only thing that Henry left undone, and this takes us
back to that original stipend of £40.
Figure 2
Coat of arms of the
Regius Professor of
Greek, Cambridge
University
Figure 3 Cardinal Wolsey; by Sampson Strong
That was not a negligible sum in 1541; a readership
was founded at the same time, and that had a stipend
of just £5. It is always hard to give modern equivalents, and one website
helpfully says that, depending on how one does the sums, it would come out
at somewhere between £20,000 and nearly £10 million. The best guess might
be somewhere between £25,000 and £30,000 – a living wage, certainly,
especially for an academic living in and fed by his college. Still, the centuries
passed, and in the middle of the nineteenth century, the stipend was still £40.
It would have sunk by then to something like a sixth of its original value;
most college tutors were by then earning perhaps £200, most professors £600,
and the theological Regius professors probably about £800. It is
understandable that two nineteenth-century professors, Thomas Gaisford and Figure 4 Tom Quad, Christ Church
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